Our Planetary Garden

 

A New View of our Earth

American soldiers and scientists working at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico took the first images of Earth from space in late October of 1946 when they attached a 35-millimeter movie camera to a confiscated German V-2 missile they were testing.  The missile reached an altitude of 65 miles, just above the limit of ‘outer space,’ before crashing back to earth with the film protected in a steel container.

Subsequent missile tests yielded images from higher and higher altitudes, until American Astronaut John Glenn became the first human to take a color photo of our planet with a hand-held camera during his February 1962 Friendship 7 mission.  He orbited the Earth three times and captured the brilliant horizon of Earth against the deep blackness of space.

But it was another six and a half years before the crew of Apollo 8 took their iconic “Earthrise” photo of our blue planet while orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, 1968.  You have likely seen this photo, taken nearly 60 years ago, which reveals the beauty of fragility of our home planet as seen from the depths of space, and that forever changed how we see our Earth.

 

Life Without Boundaries

Just as the photo of one beautiful Earth, without national boundaries, changed how we think about international politics, it has also helped us to better understand the unity of our ecosystem.  Nature doesn’t know walls, boundaries, or borders.   Winds, ocean currents, and storm systems constantly roam across our planet, continually mixing the Earths waters and soils.  Ocean currents carry seeds, sediments, sea creatures, and bits of aquatic plant life from island to island and continent to continent.  Storm winds carry pollen, seeds and spores from place to place, even transporting dust clouds from Africa to the Americas.  Butterflies, birds, and fish carry seeds and pollen with them on their endless journeys.

 

 

All of Earth’s plant, animal, fungal and microbial life exists within Earth’s biosphere, a relatively narrow zone of life-supporting atmosphere which extends from the ocean’s depths to an altitude of less than 7 miles above the planet’s surface in the troposphere, where it is too cold for plants and the air becomes ‘too thin’ to breathe because it lacks sufficient oxygen.  This is the fragile home of all life on Earth.

 

One Planetary Garden

All people, no matter where they live on Earth, enjoy and help to tend this one ‘Planetary Garden,’ an important theme in the life and work of the great French gardener, botanist, landscape designer, and entomologist Gilles Clément.  There is a single finite garden within our finite life-supporting ecosystem of land, ocean, and sky that surrounds the rocky core of our planet.  However we humans try to divide and claim pieces and slices of the Earth, the biosphere is a continuous, seamless expanse where plants and animals live and share the available resources.

 

Horticultural Pioneer Gilles Clément

Clément was a young man, in his 20s, when he first saw the photo of Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts, showing Earth rising in the black sky above the moon’s horizon.  And this photo shaped his own approach to making gardens.  He was interested in how nature itself fills empty spaces, waste spaces, damaged and abandoned land with new plants and animal life.  He purchased some abandoned farmland in a French valley near Creuse, south of Paris, to build his own home and garden, La Vallée, observing the species that appeared as the garden developed, and how ‘volunteer’ wildflowers and trees interacted with the plant species he planted.

Clément explains it well in a February 2021 article about his concept of the Planetary Garden for The Architectural Review:

“Nature is not at the service of man: we exist within her, submerged in her, intimately associated with her. The ‘planetary garden’ is a means of considering ecology as the integration of humanity – the gardeners – into its smallest spaces. Its guiding philosophy is based on the principle of the ‘garden in motion:’ do the most for, the minimum against. The ultimate goal of the planetary garden is to exploit diversity without destroying it, perpetuating the ‘planetary machine’ and ensuring the existence of the garden – and hence the gardener.“

 

The Garden in Motion

Have you noticed that while some plants remain where you plant them, expanding a bit over time but behaving respectfully towards their neighbors, other plants quickly wander about and colonize parts unknown?  Whether by stolon, stem, or rhizome, seed or spore, some plants find every opportunity to replicate themselves and crop up in unexpected places. Spring is prime time for finding these little horticultural surprises.

 

 

I’ve found several sporeling Japanese painted ferns emerging along the edges of paths and even in the lawn this spring. One leaf is poking out of the mossy side of a ‘step’ in an uphill path.  A tiny Dryopteris sporeling has unfolded three fronds through the moss under a large fig tree. I watch for these fern babies, as I also watch for hellebore seedlings growing where they might be mown down in a few weeks, and I transplant them to safer spaces.

 

Common Origins

There is no difference in how well these Asian fern species grow in our garden when compared to native species like Christmas ferns, or marsh ferns, which also volunteer wherever their spores find a moist spot to grow.  In fact, Japanese painted ferns, Athyrium niponicum, will hybridize with our native Athyrium filix-femina, resulting in the beautiful silvery hybrid A. ‘Ghost.’

 

 

Popular Asian ferns fill the same niches in our gardens as European, South American, or native North American ferns.   A fern species will thrive on a variety of continents so long as the plant’s needs are met.  Geologists and botanists tell us that closely related plants within the same genus may have first appeared on Earth when distant continents were once joined, and so they share common ancestors.  This is true for countless plant species across many genera of woody and herbaceous plants.

 

Nature’s Generosity

The garden is endlessly generous when allowed to follow its own course. I found five native dogwood tree seedlings growing in a container on the front porch last summer. At the end of the season, I knocked them out of the container and potted up each one separately in a gallon sized pot of its own. They have grown on all winter, developing good roots, and I replanted two of them into part of the fern garden in early April.  Red maple seeds rain down in every gust of wind this week, promising seedlings in the coming months.  And as I weed and prune in preparation for the new season’s growth I keep coming across seedlings of beech, oak, and hickory.  Those are among the climax species of trees in our area.  Squirrels and birds plant their seeds each fall while gathering and storing food away for the winter.

 

 

And other seedlings appear, too:  a tiny Japanese maple, Acer palmatum, offspring of a lovely tree planted here by a previous gardener; a native persimmon, Diospyros virginiana , likely related to my neighbor’s persimmon tree up the street; numerous gumball trees, Liquidambar styraciflua;  and a healthy crop of the Asian tree of heaven, Ailanthus altissima .  Every seedling invites a thoughtful decision.  Is this a desirable tree in this space?  Can it grow where it sprouted?  Should I protect it, move it, or destroy it?  As gardeners, conscious and creative, it is our prerogative to choose what grows in the spaces we tend, and how our plant communities develop. 

 

Welcome, Not Welcomed

Of course, there are always plants on our ‘not welcomed’ list appearing along with desirable plants. The weedy tree of heaven, which smells of peanut butter, is one I always remove.  Some plants, even desirable natives like Physostegia virginiana or Solidago, soon overwhelm us with their vigorous abundance within a limited garden space.  I’m already cutting out vines from shrubs and trees and digging up dandelions from herb containers this spring.  We always have too many of certain perennials, like Rudbeckia laciniata, which will grow to 7′ tall.  It is gorgeous in August when covered in golden flowers, but I don’t need an entire bed of them.

 

Perhaps our feelings towards prolific plants, which crop up in unexpected places, are a Rorschach test of our gardening style. Where do we, and our personal wishes, fit into the natural evolution of our garden? How much do we control the space, and how much do we serve as guide and steward of nature’s processes? This is a question I come back to again and again.

The Garden in Motion

As I learn more about the great contemporary French gardener and landscape architect Gilles Clément, who came to see our entire planet as one large garden, I understand more deeply that we, as gardeners, are a part of nature and nature’s processes just as much as the squirrels or blue jays who ‘planted’ those dogwoods and beech trees.  Working closely with nature in his own garden, which began as open space, Clément developed the concept of “le jardin en mouvement,” or, “the garden in motion.” He was fascinated by nature’s energy in filling the space with plant life, and his challenge was how and when to insert himself, as the gardener, into nature’s processes.

 

“To do as much as possible with, as little as possible against.”

Gilles Clément

 

The Nature We Nurture

Nature includes both the plants that grow naturally in a place and the plants we choose to introduce.  It includes the living soil, full of microorganisms, fungi, and invertebrates.  It includes both the animals who turn up in our gardens as well as ourselves, the human presence, which transforms a wilderness or a wasteland into a garden. We humans are part of nature, and to assume otherwise is to miss an important concept of garden-making.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve come to understand that we need some synthesis of the natural flora of a place and the chosen flora the gardener desires- whether that is a tomato, a few herbs, or a peony.  We should certainly plant for color and form, food and fragrance, as well as planting a rich tapestry of plants to enrich the ecosystem where we live.

 

Wildflowers or Weeds?

I spent years pulling up ‘weeds’ which I later learned to recognize as desirable wildflowers.  “Weed’ is a subjective term, after all.  And it applies mainly to plants that we don’t understand, and perhaps to plants we haven’t chosen, and certainly to those growing where we don’t want them to grow.  A few of the plants I, or earlier gardeners on this land have introduced or allowed to grow ended up behaving like ‘weeds,’ shading out or pushing out other plants that I want to thrive.  Those plants demand our attention to allow other plants the space and resources they require.

Sometimes a little of something seems nice, but at some point, the plant becomes overwhelming.  A single volunteer wildflower can colonize a larger and larger space, particularly in a lawn, when left alone.  Perhaps that’s why I always carry a pair of secateurs in my pocket!  Clément is well known for carefully pruning the ‘volunteer’ trees that cropped up in his own garden into neat hedges and topiary.  And yet, Clément reminds us “to do as much as possible with, as little as possible against.”  In his own work, this mean avoiding pesticides and chemical fertilizers.  He seeks to work with nature and her processes and to avoid further harming the environment.

 

 Walls and Fences Can’t Contain Them

Of course, any chemicals we choose to use won’t stay where we use them and will likely have unintended consequences for life forms we won’t even consider.  Wind and rain move these usually toxic substances beyond the boundaries of our own properties.  A next door neighbor was once attacking poison ivy in their yard with a popular spray herbicide.  They used so much we could smell it inside our home.  And the toxic spray was drifting onto our grape arbor and vegetable patch.  The spray affected much more plant life than they intended, we all breathed the toxic substance, and apologies were of little use at that point.

We may not think about the pollinating and native insects like butterflies and bees, their larvae, spiders, and even the many birds harmed by the chemicals we sprinkle or spray to target some perceived threat to our lawn or shrubs.  We may never see the evidence of their demise.  And in coastal Virginia, those chemicals may wash into local waterways and cause additional harm to wetlands creatures and ecosystems.  Even too much fertilizer washed into waterways stimulates the growth of algae and upsets the balance of streams and ponds.

 

A Planet in Motion…

As soils, wind, water, seeds, and spores move continuously, so our climate is also in flux.  The poles wander, the sun’s energy varies, and humans transform stored carbon into atmospheric gasses, trapping solar heat in land and sea.  We are in a warming trend at present, but a massive volcanic eruption or an asteroid strike could fill the sky with ash and debris, initiating another mini-ice age.  It has happened before.   Plants and animals respond to these climatic shifts by moving, if they can, and dying out if they can’t.  Maybe you have lost a few plants in recent summers, as have I, as a result of too much heat and too much, or too little rainfall.

 

The Asian Origin of Oaks

This is the way of things on Earth.  Fossils demonstrate that the earliest ancestors of the beech, or Fagaceae family, emerged in Asia during the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago (mya).   Many tree families currently considered native to North America originally emerged in Asia, and over long sweeps of history moved into North America over the land bridge under what is now the Bering Strait.  The first recognizable oaks, members of the genus Quercus, emerged around 56 mya, when the climate was much warmer than it is today, in what is now Northern Canada.